Authors: Michael Malone
We were drinking our bloody marys, admiring the scotch pine (no tacky lights and tinsel, just genuine little Victorian knick-knacks scattered here and there); listening to the Preservation Hall Jazz Band record I’d gotten him; Alice was saying, “Oh, sweetheart,
another
dress!,” when we heard the beeper go off in my jacket.
Justin said, “When constabulatory duty's to be done, to be done, / A policeman's lot is not a happy one, happy one.” Alice said, “Shit.”
Zeke Caleb said Merry Christmas, he was sorry, but call Etham Foster right away at the following number. Etham didn’t say he was sorry, he said he was at a filling station near where they were pulling a body out of the Shocco River.
I said, “Dr. D., I hate to sound unfeeling, but I’ve seen bodies, I’ve even seen bodies pulled out of the Shocco, and so have you. And you’re supposed to be
off
today with your family; Ruthie's starting to hate me as it is.”
He said, “Just come on, Cuddy. I-28, left on Exit Nine, past that farmhouse, one-point-six miles in, path to the river, you’ll see us. Body's in a car.”
“Slidell's farmhouse?”
“Right.”
“Somebody drove off the bank?”
“Didn’t. Pushed.”
Justin said, “Okay, this makes two episodes, same place! I told you!”
“Whatcha want, J.B.S., a raise? Looks like about double last year's salary's lying around the room here anyhow.”
Alice walked us to the door. “Don’t mind me, boys, I’ve got at least two hours of packages left to go.”
“Don’t open anything ’til I get back,” Justin told her; he loves to watch folks tear into presents. “Just be an hour.”
But it was more like three before I sent Jay the Bountiful home.
Where Cooper's Subaru and the truck had collided, the skid marks still looked fresh, the shoulder torn open. We bounced along a packed-clay road, through fields that had probably once been plowed for brightleaf tobacco, corn, and soybeans, but now were back to grass and young pines; if you don’t fight her hard, Nature's fast to reclaim her own. The tractor in the yard at Slidell's farm hadn’t been driven in years, and the rusted pickup near it didn’t even have its tires anymore. Since we were there, we stopped for a second. The doors were still locked; nobody was home. Justin showed me the barn; as Parker had reported, there were now no huge rolls of paper squeezed in with the other junk.
“There was an old white Ford right here.” Justin pointed. “See the oil drip?”
“Maybe Slidell drove it off for the holidays.”
That proved not to be the case. About a mile farther in from the highway, three of our cruisers had their lights flashing. We walked the clearing toward the river; it was drivable, more or less, but not by me in my new Oldsmobile. Obviously the car in the river had made it through the dead kudzu, sumac, and maple saplings to the edge of the steep eroded bank. And obviously my men had gotten a tow truck down in there, because they’d winched the car half out of the thick brown water. It was gunked with slimy weeds and mud, but it was still unmistakably the white Ford Justin had seen in Slidell's barn. We leaned over the crumbling ledge; you could see the car's path down to the Shocco gouged in red clay and broken roots.
“‘Sixty-eight Fairlane,” said Etham Foster, looming up behind
me. Under his sheepskin, he had on a new red sweater; no doubt a Christmas present. “Been in there a few days.”
“Merry Christmas, Dr. D. Get the body out?”
He pointed at a plastic bag near the bank. Dick Cohen (our medical examiner, fellow about my age) sat on a stump, sadly puffing a pipe.
Justin asked, “Etham, the car was pushed?”
“Drove it in Low to the ledge, jumped, it went over. You’ll see,” was all we got for an answer as he headed back for the tow truck. I asked him if he’d identified the body, but he didn’t hear me. It didn’t matter, because as soon as Justin pulled the tarp down, he said, “It's Willie Slidell. I knew it.”
I sighed. “If you were figuring to pin the Hall shooting on this guy, you need a backup plan, ’cause I don’t believe Willie here would go to the trouble to plug himself in the chest this many times before driving off a twenty-foot ledge into a river—no matter how remorseful he’d gotten to feeling.” Because we didn’t need Dr. Cohen to tell us Slidell hadn’t died from a bump on the head, or water in the lungs either.
“Three shots, probably dead when they put him in the car,” Cohen said. “Where's my ambulance? I gotta get out of here, I’m blue.” Dick Cohen had emigrated from Brooklyn for “the weather,” and now did nothing but complain about it. Like a lot of New Yorkers, he had a shaky sense of geography beyond the Hudson, and had apparently figured the “South,”
anywhere
in the South, meant warm as Miami. He pulled his ski cap farther down his narrow bald head. “Cheesh, my kid wanted a car for Christmas. Oughta bring him out here, show him what can happen.”
I said, “For Christmas? Y’all were just celebrating Hanukkah last week.”
He laughed. “Yeah, if my kids heard they handed out gifts on Buddha's birthday, we’d be celebrating that too.”
Justin was going through Slidell's pockets like a derelict in an alley. I left him at it. There were about half a dozen cops on the scene now, including a diver and photographer. John Emory, soaked up to the knot of his neat tie, was shivering inside a thick blanket. He and Nancy White had taken the call and found the body—a
rough way to start their partnership. I saw Nancy a few yards off, also wrapped in a blanket, leaning against a big oak. She had her arm around a skinny boy of eleven or twelve in a cheap cut-down coat, sneakers, and a just about shaved blond head (quick cure for lice, probably). Nancy was nodding as she listened to him. “Hey, Chief, c’mere,” she yelled at me. “Talk to Wally.”
Wally lived about two miles up the road in a rental farm— modern lingo for a tenant shack with a couple of worked-out acres and a few dozen scruffy chickens. He’d found the car because he’d gotten a Daisy air rifle for Christmas. Forbidden to leave the yard with it, naturally he’d rushed off into the woods to shoot anything that happened to be there. Not much was, so he’d kept walking until he’d come upon the clearing of smashed undergrowth, which he’d followed to the ledge above the Shocco. There he’d hidden, pretending to be somebody like Rambo, firing down on “stuff” in the river. It wasn’t that he’d deduced the car from the rutted bank, or even seen the car, which had been completely submerged. He’d just leaned out too far from his ambush spot, the ledge had given way, and he’d tumbled down the bank, losing his brand-new rifle to the muddy water. So he’d dived in, coat and all. And that's when he’d bumped up against the Ford. If he’d hit it diving, it might have killed him.
The dive had been instinct; the decision to tell his parents about it was courage, because as Nancy told me later, “his fuckin’ daddy whipped him good”—I suspect because the boy’d lost a B.B. gun that they’d doubtless had on lay-away since summer. But after Wally's folks had taken a look at the ruts, and weighed the pros and cons of isolationism versus citizenship, in the end they’d decided to call the police. Nancy had already talked to them, then brought Wally back with her to the scene.
I leaned down, shook the boy's cold skinny hand. He wore a cheap digital watch that looked big as a clock on his wrist. “Thank you,” I said. “You did the right thing. I’m Cuddy Mangum. Merry Christmas.”
He was clearly scared speechless, but he nodded up at me, then looked back at Nancy.
She said, “Chief, I told Wally we’d get him a new rifle, okay?”
“That seems pretty reasonable, Officer White.” (She not only didn’t have her tie on; she was wearing a bulky purple-striped turtle-neck over her khaki shirt. Looks like everybody got sweaters for Christmas.)
I sat down on the cold grass beside them. “You lived around here long, Wally?” He nodded. “Your folks know Willie Slidell pretty well?”
His small Adam's apple gulped. “Some. Not too good, I guess.” He looked across the clearing at the plastic mound where Justin knelt. “Is it him? Mr. Slidell?”
“Yes.” I gave him a little while to adjust to this. “Wally? Is that Mr. Slidell's car? You recognize it when we pulled it out?”
“No sir. He's got a tan station wagon.”
“What about this white Ford?”
His pale blue eyes stayed bravely on mine. “He didn’t drive it that I know of. But I think I maybe saw it once or twice.”
“In the barn?” No answer. I took out two packages of cheese crackers, threw one of them in his lap, and opened the other one. “Wally, what grade you in, eighth?”
“No sir, sixth.”
“Really? You sure look older.”
“I’m eleven and a half.” He opened the crackers carefully and slid one out.
“The school bus take you all the way home or let you off out on the exit road?”
“By the road.”
“Didn’t you ever sort of check out Slidell's place when you were passing by? Look around, you know? Like lately, I’m wondering if he had somebody visiting him for a while?” Wally studied the ground and I chewed up a cracker. “You know what? My teachers used to say to me, ‘Cuddy, curiosity killed the cat.’ But those teachers were wrong as they could be.” I popped another cracker in my mouth, and finally he started to nibble on his. “Curiosity made me the youngest chief of police Hillston ever had.”
He looked up suspiciously. Well, I did have on jeans, sneakers, and a down jacket. I said, “Nancy, you wanna tell this man I’m the chief of police.”
Nancy vouched for me.
Wally thought it over, finished his cracker, and slid out another. “I think he lived all by himself.”
“Um hum. Ever get a good look in his barn?”
“I guess I saw the Ford there.”
“Good. See any big rolls of paper in there?”
“It could have been paper. Tall round things in cardboard?”
“Right. That's good. Slidell ever run you off his place? That used to happen to me a lot, I’d be snooping around.”
Wally slowly nodded yes without looking up. “But I never took stuff, or even touched it,” he mumbled. He took his time over a few more nibbles. “I think somebody was staying there last week maybe. I think a couple of times I saw him out in the yard.”
“You think you could describe him?”
Wally described a large muscular man, neither young nor old, dark nor fair, “just regular.” One time Wally saw him through the window without his shirt on; he had a red scar sideways on his back. One time he watched him out in the yard firing at coffee cans with a big pistol.
I asked him, “Good shot, this man?”
“Yessir.” He nodded seriously.
“Did you happen to check around for bullets? I would, if I’d been you.” Blinking slowly, he nodded again, and admitted he’d picked up some of the slugs after the man had gone back in the house. I told him Nancy was going to take him home and borrow those bullet shells; tomorrow we wanted him to come down to my office and look at some pictures with us, and then we’d give him a new B.B. gun. I threw in a promised tour of the jail, and he ate a half cracker in one gulp. “One more thing, Wally, you remember Saturday, when there was the big accident right up here on I-28. When the two men got killed?”
He looked sorry to let me down. “I just saw it on TV.”
“Too bad. I was hoping you maybe noticed something. Because you’re a good noticer, real good.”
Wally was disappointed to have to say that he hadn’t been anywhere near the car crash. He’d ridden his bike five miles west, over to Lake Road Airport, the small private landing field where
they gave flying lessons, plus Piper Cub rides for twenty-five dollars, which if he ever had twenty-five dollars he was going to take. “Saturdays I go to watch them sometimes. They don’t see me. I sort of hide,” he admitted, though with some trouble breathing—apparently he’d been forbidden to go to the airport, or warned off by the people who ran it. When I said he ought to be careful riding a bike along a highway, he gave me a look that was pride pure and simple. “I’m careful. I noticed something at the airport,” he added.
“What was that, Wally?”
“Saturday, the one you mean? That man was there riding in a plane with this other man that comes a lot.”
“What man?” I thought he meant the man at Slidell's.
But he didn’t. “I ’membered him when they showed his picture on the TV. That black man, that the news says they shot him.”
“Cooper Hall?”
“My daddy don’t believe the news though. He says y’all just want people thinking somebody shot him ’cause it's like Martin Luther King.”
Nancy and I looked at each other. I said, “Are you sure about this, Wally? You saw Cooper Hall at the airport. Are you
real
sure?”
He thought about it. “Yessir.”
Wally didn’t know who the other man was, but thought probably somebody at Lake Road Airport could tell us his name, because he had his own plane. “They all treat him like a kind of a big shot, I guess. Just the one that got shot was black. The other one looked kind of rich.”
He’d even noticed the time when Coop Hall and the other man had gone up for their plane ride on Saturday, and when they’d come down. While he was watching, he kept track of flights on his watch, which he told us he’d bought with his egg money and it was “a good one.” They’d stayed up an hour, and landed at “two-thirty-something.”
“Did they leave together?”
“No, just the black man. He drove off in his car, sort of a beat-up car.” Wally folded the plastic around the rest of his crackers, and put them in his coat pocket. He looked at us both. “Does that help?”
I said, “Wally, that helps. That helps so much, in a couple of
days, Officer White's gonna come back out here and take you up for a twenty-five-dollar plane ride. That's a Christmas present.”
Nancy said, “Forget it. I’ve never been in a plane in my life.”
Wally gave her a solemn stare: “Me neither. So it’ll be okay.”
Christmas night I spent downtown in my office, reading articles and reports, drawing circles around names on my blackboard; “thinking with chalk,” as the man called it who’d given me the habit, whose name, in fact, was on my board now. “Isaac” with a question mark. Where was he, and what did he know was missing from Cooper Hall's file box?